Why do people attend the funerals of people they don't know? Many are there to support the grieving family members that they do know, but there are people who regularly attend funerals of complete strangers for various reasons of their own. A 19th-century undertaker pointed out one of the ""amateur mourners" to a reporter.    

“Well,” continued the undertaker, with an appreciative smile, “she’s as fine a regular attendant as any establishment in this city can produce. I send her an invitation to all my nice funerals, and I have sometimes sent a carriage for her when I knew mourners would be scarce. She is never really happy unless she is at a funeral. She won’t touch weddings, as most women will; her sole amusement, so to speak, is a first-class funeral;” and the undertaker looked over to the old lady with a tender professional interest.

“I have some other nice people on my list,” he went on. “One of my most graceful mourners live in Forty-eight street, and seldom gets down this way, but she hardly ever passes a day without a funeral, and I never saw her at one when she couldn’t’ shed tears with the best of them. She’s one of the heart-brokenest ladies I ever had for a ‘regular.’ Does she really feel badly? Well, I should say she did, most decidedly. She always has a word to say to the family, if she thinks they need comforting, and is very careful to learn all the particulars. Why, she can tell me all the details about some of my own funerals that I had forgotten years ago. She’s as good as a set of books.

This undertaker also knew of mourners who were obsessed with one particular part of the funerary rites or who wanted to get into the business, some who came for the food, and a few who were looking for a newly-available spouse. Read about amateur mourners at the Victorian Book of the Dead. -via Strange Company

Folkoperan in Stockholm, Sweden, had a great promotional idea to appeal to children, and bring them into the opera house to enjoy the musical version of Coraline. They gave out bunches of broccoli to families with an invitation to choose "broccoli or opera." Understandably, most children chose to see the opera. And they loved it! No worries, though, children often change their minds about broccoli when they grow up. -via Nag on the Lake

March Madness is here, and it's not all about basketball! The Morning News is launching their 16th annual Tournament of Books. Have you read any of the books in the tournament bracket? This weekend, the tournament opens with a play-in round to see which novel will go into the lower right corner: Golden State, Oval, or We Cast a Shadow. A different literary judge determines the winner of each matchup and gives a review of each book. See which book won that round, and check out the schedule of future rounds in the right sidebar at the tournament site. Before the tournament is over, you could have a great reading list! Keep up with the tournament here through the championship round on March 31. -via Kottke

Some people are never going to be happy. They take a vacation trip to a US National Park and then leave a one-star review. Artist Amber Share found some rather interesting one-star reviews on various public sites and used the complaints in them to illustrate park posters in her series Subpar Parks.   



See all the posters so far at Instagram, and read an interview with Share about them at Atlas Obscura.

You know Kevin James from the TV series King of Queens, and some movies, too. Now he's taken to YouTube to bring us some blissfully short (most less than two minutes) comedy skits. Several of them have James in the role of a movie sound technician encountering job problems, like he hasn't read the script, as in the above video, or not getting any cooperation, as in this one.



Yeah, I figured they were so short, you may as well try out two of them. You can check out all his videos from the last two weeks at James' new YouTube channel. -via Metafilter

In the middle of Rome, there is a stone stairway leading from the Arx of Capitoline Hill down to the Roman Forum. These are called Scalae Gemoniae, and they were the site of many executions during the height of the Roman Empire, because the more public an execution is, the more it displays power to the masses.

Falling down a flight of stairs by itself was seldom fatal, so the condemned was usually strangled, then their lifeless bodies bound and thrown down the stairs. The bodies remained at the bottom of the stairs for a few days until they started to rot or were partially scavenged by dogs and vultures. When Lucius Sejanus’s body came tumbling down the stairs, the frenzied crowd themselves tore it to pieces. The corpses were then dragged off with a hook and thrown into the Tiber.

After Tiberius’s death in 37 AD, the practice of execution on the stairs became less frequent, although the stairs continued to be used in this fashion throughout the imperial period. One famous victim of the stairs was emperor Vitellius. During the brutal battle for Rome between Vitellius' forces and the armies of Vespasian, in 69 AD, Vitellius was dragged out of his hiding place and driven to the Gemonian stairs, where he was tortured to death. His body was then flung down the stairs where it was attacked by Rome’s residents. Indeed, getting executed and abused on the stairs was a matter of great shame and dishonor for the dead.

Read about Scalae Gemoniae, or the stairs of death, at Amusing Planet.  -via Strange Company

So many sports evolved gradually from one form to another, but trampoline -both the apparatus and the sport- are the product of one man's imagination. That should be George Nissan, who was inspired by a 1930 visit to the circus as a teenager. When the aerialists dropped to the net below them, he saw them bounce and thought that would be fun ...if the bouncing could continue. Nissen's granddaughter Dian tells his story.

Nissen continued to pursue his dream in college, where he teamed with his gymnastics coach Larry Griswald to produce the first viable prototype in 1934 made with angle iron, canvas and inner tubes to give it that oh-so important bounce. The rubber parts were later replaced with metal springs for durability and strength.

The duo persisted with their invention by promoting its uses with children and athletes. As popularity soared, they started the Griswold-Nissen Trampoline & Tumbling Company in 1942. Griswold was dropped from the business name after the gymnastics coach later left the business to pursue a solo career in acrobatics, diving and entertainment.

“My father knew he was on to something,” Dian says. “He took it to a YMCA camp to try it out and the kids loved it. They wouldn’t even get off it to go to the pool.”

Read about the invention of the trampoline, and Nissen's other contributions to the sport at Smithsonian.

George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had dreams, some that they shared, and when they reached the point where they both had Hollywood clout, they could so any kind of film they wanted. So they designed a thrill ride that gave us Indiana Jones.  

“What we’re doing here, really, is designing a ride at Disneyland,” Spielberg kept telling his collaborators. Spielberg wanted Raiders to be less of a linear story and more of a series of increasingly giddy cliffhangers. Spielberg, Lucas, and Kasdan designed Indiana Jones to be a classical, mythic man of action, the kind of guy who steals the horse and launches himself after the truck without thinking twice about it. They succeeded wildly. Raving about Raiders, Roger Ebert wrote, “It’s actually more than a movie; it’s a catalog of adventure.”

They actually designed the action scenes first, then filled in a plot just to string those scenes together. Read how it happened at The A.V. Club.

The game Foldit was developed years ago and launched to the public in 2008. The Game Science department and the Biochemistry department at the University of Washington combined forces to develop a video game that would crowdsource the structures of proteins, which can be folded in unlimited ways. Now the game has been recruited in the fight against the coronavirus that causes the dreaded Covid-19 illness.

In the game, players are shown the binding site of the coronavirus spike protein. To come up with folding solutions, you'll have to understand some basics of both proteins and how the coronavirus invades human cells. Luckily, all of this is explained in extensive detail on the game website.

The objective is to design a protein that binds to the available sidechains at the spike protein's binding site, where it typically interacts with human cells. This protein will effectively block all interactions between the viral protein and human cells.

Sounds like a win-win situation. You can play the game and enjoy it, learn something about science, and maybe contribute to saving lives! Read more about Foldit's new mission at the game site. -Thanks, Brother Bill!

It's more common now for actors to use their real names than in the past, while singers are more apt to take a stage name than in the past. But whether the name is real, made up for show business, or some combination of both, there's always a story behind them. Mindy Kaling's name is pretty honest, but reveals both her age and her mother's taste in television. The story behind the name Deadmau5 is both random and bizarre.

Read the stories behind 22 stage names at Cracked.

Car dealers rely on commissions for their income, and that means a sale could be an act of desperation. Some dealers are highly professional, some will cut corners wherever they can, and occasionally you may run into one who'll do anything, no matter how shady, to close a deal. Two consumer protection attorneys talk about the things car dealers have done that you need to be aware of. Whether these tactics are illegal depends on where you live, but they can all cost you money -and headaches.

Dealers that curbstone. They have a hard time moving the car off their lot so they advertise it on craigslist and pretend it is a private sale. (This may be legal in some states but it certainly is shady). The key? Beware of a private seller claiming they have a dealer doing the paperwork as a favor.

Dealers that don’t pay off trade ins (when they have agreed to do so to make a sale). I’ve heard of dealers dragging their feet and of the occasional dealer that never paid it off. The key is to follow up quickly and be wary of dealing with smaller, lesser-known car lots when it comes to a deal like this.

There are plenty more of these at Jalopnik.

There are numerous songs out now written around the coronavirus outbreak. This one from the national health department in Vietnam is taking the world by storm after John Oliver featured it on his show Last Week Tonight. The tune is based on the hit song "Jealous," performed by the original artists with new lyrics informing the public how to deal with the threat of the virus. The song itself is an earworm, but earworms are not deadly. -via Boing Boing

Remember Perdita, the world's worst cat? Mitchel County Animal Rescue received more than 200 applications to adopt her after her story went viral in January. She was taken home by a family in Tennessee who already had four cats.

“We had an instant connection to her and her to us as well,” Betty Samimi, one of the cat’s new humans, told HuffPost in an email.

Perdita, aka Noel, is still adjusting to her new situation, with “some days better than others,” Samimi said. While there have been some scratching and biting incidents, Samimi noted Perdita is “very lovable,” playful and runs up to greet Samimi when she walks in. She’s also already bonding with one of her new feline housemates.

A new name came with her new life. They are calling her Noel. Read more at HuffPo. You can follow Perdita/Noel's progress at Instagram. -via Digg

The Batmobile from the new Batman film starring Robert Pattinson has been revealed in pictures from Matt Reeves at Twitter. It's strange how different people look at it. The breakdown from Jalopnik is all about the automotive side.  

The Batmobile in these pictures is almost certainly some sort of custom body built around a truck chassis with fake cages and dramatic plumming tacked all over the place, as most prop cars are. But if we indulge our suspension of disbelief a little it looks, to me, like a 1970 Barracuda with a Ford Triton V10 mounted between the rear wheels.

While the response from io9 is more about how it makes us feel.

Hot Damn, Look at The Batman's New Ride

🦇🏎 #TheBatman pic.twitter.com/qJFNprk1ut

— Matt Reeves (@mattreevesLA) March 4, 2020

If you by any chance watched The Rise of Skywalker and thought "This would be better as an old-style video game," here you go. No one thought this, of course, except maybe John Stratman who went ahead and made it happen. However, this sequence does show us the slew of Force ghosts we didn't get to see in the movie. -via Geeks Are Sexy